Tarot Prediction and the “Eternal Now”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Over the last couple of years I’ve been toying with the increasingly popular theory that what we are looking at in a tarot prediction is not the foreseeable “Future” but just another face of the “Eternal Now” that has not yet presented itself to the querent’s conscious awareness. In other words, every conceivable occurrence exists in potential at any point in time; one specific instance can be singled out by the reading and, with a little concerted effort (or in some cases benign neglect) by the seeker, chosen to become his or her personal reality. The cards of the tarot, in their almost infinite combinations, excel at enumerating these opportunities. Here I’ve tried to approach the idea more systematically.
Although he eventually waxes a bit mystical in his discussion of the astral and spiritual realms, French occultist Joseph Maxwell said it quite plainly in The Tarot:
“Coming events cast a shadow before them; each individual has a presentiment about his own destiny, which may remain latent: the normal processes of consciousness do not include such presentiments. To understand the presence in each individual of a detailed record of personal consciousness it is necessary to take into account the fact that an individual being exists, as it were, on several planes simultaneously, or is capable of so doing.”
Back in the ’80s when I was formulating my personal take on the Celtic Cross spread I had already recognized that the “Recent Past, Present and Near Future” positions in the layout do not display compartmentalized “bins of experience” defined by temporal cycles and bounded by calendar dates but instead show a single seamless evolution that gradually slides into focus as a result of being examined through a particular lens or filter. In that sense each card is more impressionistic than factual and each position delivers one facet of a commingled totality that is only incidentally linear. The language I used in the guidance I eventually wrote for the spread states it thus:
“Cards 4 through 6 are read as a continuum rather than as discrete blocks of time, since it isn’t always easy to see where one phase leaves off and the next one begins; one flows into the other, the recent past informs the present and the present presages the near future. (These cards) tend to be fluid regarding the timing of events: the Past may still be strongly felt in Present circumstances, while the most probable Future may already be visible as either a logical extension of the Past/Present dynamic or as an emerging new direction.”
There is a scientific postulate that chronological time as we think we understand it doesn’t actually exist, it is only an illusion of our uniquely human mode of perception (this is the premise behind the concept of parallel universes; just because we can’t perceive or directly interact with them doesn’t mean they aren’t real). Yesterday, today and tomorrow (delimited by the constantly moving horizon) are only conventions by which we measure the progress of our daily lives (as Swinburne wrote, “between a sleep and a sleep”), and as we move farther out in time the past becomes increasingly irrelevant as we forget or suppress much of what we have experienced. It may be inexorably “burned in our flesh” (or captured in a diary or journal) but it is still mainly an abstraction to our waking sensibilities that is impossible to relive except in dreams (although we may try to make up for it, live up to it or outlive it). While it may offer a useful perspective on current circumstances, the past is a “closed book” as far as actionable content, and the as-yet-unwritten “novel of the future” is still in nascent form, so all we have to extrapolate from is our present condition.
Wherever we are psychologically at the time of a reading, we are present in mind and body and will be there largely unchanged after the reading, only perhaps with a different set of expectations. As a member of the human race we will unavoidably suffer the generic effects of the passage of years but it is only by our private acknowledgement of its consequences that we can differentiate one moment of time from the next, and that experience is different for everyone. (One of Alesiter Crowley’s justifications for his “Every man and woman is a star” aphorism is that no two people can stand at exactly the same spot on the Earth at precisely the same instant; one must give up the spotlight in deference to the other, thus proclaiming neither one a “stellar” singularity)
If we think of the Future not as an independent entity but only as an extension of the Present that has itself been shaped by defining events in the Past, we can appreciate that the act of simply “living through it” is a different proposition from cultivating an appreciation for the elasticity of objective reality as it frames our subjective existence. (We must stand outside the box to contemplate its contents.) In spite of all our calendars, clocks and schedules, time is not so much a clearly-defined environment with step-wise increments as it is a profound experiential hypothesis, but — unless we delve deeply into scientific speculation — it’s all we have to work with in the art of divination. For this reason, some people shy away from prognostication entirely and just work in humanistic terms (in short, pursuing only the “who and why” of personal growth while ignoring the “what, where and when” of action-and-event-based prediction). I consider these readers to be the “psychological mystics” as distinct from the “analytical intuitives” among whom I count myself.
Every human being begins life with a “biological blueprint” formed by our ancestral DNA but it is experience-over-time and the associated shifts in consciousness that transform us into unique individuals. (Psychologists have said that personality is innate but character is learned behavior.) Each moment offers a new opportunity to reinvent ourselves, if only in small ways, and it could be said that our assumed future is just an accumulation of such minute events that can be creatively deduced from the “current model” via the act of divination and then synthesized into a reasonable approximation of destiny (while trying to avoid the pitfalls of “cold reading”). Barring a complete makeover (or breakdown), it’s likely we will be much the same tomorrow or next year as we are today, and this trajectory is something that can be estimated with confidence based on existing conditions (after all, no matter how well-off or poorly-situated we are, change is not something we tolerate with great equanimity). In fanciful terms I liken it to projecting a “hologram” of our present identity forward onto the timeline with the tarot cards as convenient earmarks of what we subconsciously intend for our self-development.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on April 23, 2023.
